


A Valentine's Day Murder

by GodfreyRaphael



Series: Valentine's Day [2]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Assassination, But it's not as clearcut as it appears to be, Crime, Death, Gen, M. Night Shyamalan would be proud, Murder, Mystery, Spoilers: there are twists and turns, maybe not
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-01 03:28:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17859392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodfreyRaphael/pseuds/GodfreyRaphael
Summary: A murder on Valentine's Day shocks the country right to its core. But it's not just the act that surprises everyone; it's who was killed that has really sent everyone into an uproar. But as investigators delve deeper into the motives of the killer, things will turn out to be not as clear as when the whole thing started.





	1. The Assassination of Jake Berenson

My name is Gavin Doubleday.

No, I'm not related to Abner Doubleday, the Civil War officer often (wrongly, I might add) credited with inventing baseball, the national pastime. That's a myth that has been thorougly and consistently debunked by experts despite what some might say to be the valiant but futile efforts of Major League Baseball. However, I am related to a certain Army officer named Doubleday, a Doubleday that you might be somewhat more familiar with if you've been following recent developments in the US. Yes, that's right. I am the son of General Sam Doubleday.

Now I'm sure you're asking, "Who the hell is Sam Doubleday?" And I wouldn't blame you for not knowing him. Surely he's not the most well-known Army general in the present day, even though he may have belonged in the same "batch" as them, if you will. Colin Powell, David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal; America's war generals, forged in the jungles of Vietnam, sharpened by the sands of Kuwait, and then subsequently blunted in the mountains of Afghanistan and the cities of Iraq. Samson Doubleday was one of them, and yet he is not remembered by the American people as well as the others. And for the few people who _do_ remember him, he most probably isn't remembered very fondly, since it was under Doubleday's command that over three thousand American soldiers died trying to board the Yeerk Pool ship. It was an absolute massacre, a massacre that many historians today have claimed was completely unnecessary and should not have happened. However, because the Yeerk forces defending the Pool were so busy slaughtering the ground forces, they failed to notice that the Animorphs and a number of their own alien allies had managed to infiltrate the Pool ship, and we all know what happened after that. So was my father's ground assault actually vital to the human victory over the Yeerks? Well, I'm not writing this story to answer that question. Leave that to the others, the "armchair generals" and the ones who have actually had a taste of command.

No, I am writing this story because it is quite possibly one of the weirdest stories in the history of mankind. It's certainly the weirdest and even the craziest story in my life. And after all the controversies, the cover-ups, and the conspiracy theories, I think that it's time that I finally set the record straight. After all, I was there when it happened. Of course I don't mean the exact event itself, but I was there investigating what had happened and trying to figure out why it had happened. And to this day I still have trouble coming to terms with the discoveries that me and my investigative team have made. I am also well aware that there will be many people out there who will read my story and call me a bald-faced liar, a corrupt and two-faced slimeball willing to accept whatever price the government had paid me to come up with a story that agrees with their "approved" version of events. And I say to them that they can believe whatever they want, but what follows from this is an accounting of events which I have seen with my two eyes.

As stated in my very brief autobiography at the back, I am presently a detective of the Los Angeles Police Department. There aren't a lot of us out there, and therefore we are a tightly-knit group who will stand for each other through thick and thin and even take a bullet for the other if it has to come to that. But I had come to the police by way of the Army, for just like my father I had gone to West Point to serve my country. And I did my service; two tours in Iraq, and I even had a Purple Heart (and scars on my abdomen where a bullet had clean through and almost ruptured my appendix) to show for it. After I had been shot, I came to realize that I actually didn't like the Army life so I took an honorable discharge and decided to go into the police force instead. I first became a cop in Annapolis of all places before eventually reaching the rank of detective with the Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police. And then when my father contracted tuberculosis, I moved to Los Angeles so that I could both take care and keep an eye on him, and once he had recovered (barely) I joined the LAPD's Detective Force.

I should tell you beforehand that being a detective is almost nothing like what shows like _CSI_ would have you believe. People don't die or get killed in weird and creative ways every week, and even if they did, it's not like we get to solve the case and say that the butler slipped on the pool tiles and dropped the garden hose on the heiress's head which startled the Siamese cat and made it run away with the hose, somehow inadvertently strangling said heiress just in time for next week's episode. We consider ourselves lucky that we only get probably one case that could serve as an inspiration for a _CSI_ episode every year, and if in a given season there is nothing at all that could be said to have come from some shit that had happened in the City of Angels, we're really proud of ourselves. We even pat ourselves on the back for a job well done in keeping the craziness out of our case files. Oh, and just to make it clear, I am _not_ going to talk about that "strangled by her own cat" case, much as I would have wanted to. But the case I _am_ going to discuss; well, it's one that certainly needs to be discussed, if only to make as much of the facts as absolutely clear as possible.

I still remember the day when I got the call. It was Valentine's Day, and I was in the office poring over some active case files where our progress had not been as quick as I would have liked because I have decided to remain single for the rest of the year after my girlfriend of three years broke up with me right on New Year's Eve. But that's yet another story. I was at my desk, sifting through some case files for clues that me or my fellow detectives had missed when I received a call on my cellphone. "Doubleday," I answered.

"Yo Gav, it's Eli," Elijah Kristofferson, a fellow detective and a good friend of mine, said from the other end. Listen, something big just went down at the Yeerk War Memorial. You won't believe who just got shot here."

"Dude, I got all day," I replied. "I'm all ears."

"It's Jake. Jake Berenson. Leader of the Animorphs. He's our DB."

"What? Really?" I gasped as I pushed myself away from my desk in surprise. "Jake Berenson is dead?"

"Yep, Gav. No joke. Your dad worked with him, right? Right before the end of the war?"

"Yeah, he did." I can't say that I know the story of how my father and Jake Berenson worked on the plan to take the Yeerk Pool ship; I was only in my first year at West Point back then, and Dad had never really talked about it afterwards. I can't say that I blame him, not after what had happened on the ground during that attack.

"So Jake Berenson is dead," I said. "Was it self-inflicted?" I can't claim to know the guy well, but for the very few public appearances that he had made since the end of the Yeerk War, I had always had the impression that Jake Berenson was a man living on borrowed time. It wasn't because he was sick; it was because the weights of his actions and responsibilities were weighing heavily upon him, exacting a toll on his mental health. He had done a lot of things fighting for the freedom of humanity against the Yeerk Empire, things that were certainly not acceptable in peacetime. And he had gotten into the fight in the first place because of his brother Tom, whom if I remember correctly was one of the humans that had been captured by the Yeerks and turned into their hosts, Controllers as they were called. But, according to the "official" Animorphs memoirs, Jake had given his cousin Rachel the order to kill Tom during the final battle that eventually led to the defeat of the Yeerk invasion. That surely must have been weighing on his mind ever since. And I had always said to myself that I wouldn't be surprised if one day Jake was found dead, having killed himself by whatever means he had deemed necessary to take his own life.

And yet here I was, surprised to hear the news that Jake had indeed died. And as I asked that question to Eli, I was already bracing myself for the inevitable "yes" that would come from the other end.

"No, actually, I don't think so, man," Eli replied. "Unless you can shoot yourself three times in the chest without flinching."

Now that came completely out of the blue. That was not how I had expected the leader of the Animorphs to bite the dust. "You're saying that he got shot three times?"

"You heard me right, Gav. Now, the Chief doesn't want word of this to get out until we have, and I quote, 'looked at all the facts', but if you ask me, Gav, I think we're looking at an assassination here. And if it is what I think it is, the whole department's going to be balls deep in this stuff."

"I gotcha, Eli. I'll be there in... an hour, traffic permitting," I said after I had looked at my watch.

"Yeah, right. As if traffic's gonna miraculously clear up for you, man," Eli said to me before he hung up.

I arrived at the Yeerk War Memorial after ninety minutes, just as Eli Kristofferson had said I would miss the deadline that I had set for myself. There was already a small crowd forming around the cordon of yellow police tape that was there to separate the crime scene from the rest of the world. I flashed my detective badge at the LAPD officers standing guard at the tape keeping the crowd at bay, and they lifted up the tape for me to duck under.

"Oh, look who finally decided to show up," a man with tanned skin and Asian features and wearing a beige trench coat over his suit said as he heard my footsteps.

"They called you down here too, Tommy?" I asked in reply. "What did the wife say to you about that?"

"Ah, she understands. She knew what she was getting into when she married me," replied Tomoyuki Okamoto, another friend of mine in the Detective Force. Tommy, as we called him in the force, was a third-generation Japanese-American who came to LA by way of San Francisco. He was a good guy to hang out with; pleasant, funny, and cool enough to shoot the breeze with. Out of all the people in the force, Tommy Okamoto was one of the few people whom I could definitely call my best friend.

"Nice to see you, man," I said as I shook hands with Tommy, and then we both got into a bro hug.

"I could say the same to you," Tommy told me. "Still drowning yourself in work, huh?"

"About the only thing that I can do to keep myself occupied," I admitted. "And you being here means that we really are going all hands on deck for this one. All right, man, walk me through this. What do we know?"

"Not a lot, Gav," Tommy replied. "There was only one guard on duty so not a lot of witnesses there. But we might just have a lead on that, because the guard said that there was only one other person who went to the memorial before he heard gunshots."

"Maybe that's our shooter right there," I said, referring to the person that the guard had said had come to the memorial after Jake. "Then again, maybe our shooter has been camping out in or near the memorial and waited for Mr. Berenson to come."

"Could be, could be," Tommy nodded. "But we gotta ignore all that until the evidence comes in. Like the Chief said, this is going to be the biggest case that we are going to have on our hands. We can't leave no stone unturned and all that sort of stuff."

Tommy and I finally arrived at the place where Jake Berenson had fallen for the last time. Eli Kristofferson was sitting on his haunches beside the body, staring off into the distance somberly. "Well, here he is, guys," he said as we approached him. "Prince Jake. Oh Fearless Leader, in the flesh. Or at least what's left of it."

I squatted down to the other side of Berenson's body, examining it as closely as possible without actually touching it. He was wearing a black coat over a white T-shirt and rough and thick blue jeans that, if he were wearing them in the present day and age, would be called "dad jeans". A pair of basketball-style sneakers were on his feet. His arms were spread out at right angles to his body, and his face was tilted to the right. Truth be told, as I was looking at him at that moment, Jake Berenson looked like he had just fallen asleep. His face had this serene and peaceful quality about it, as if he had seen what was going to happen and had accepted it without a fight. The look of peace on Jake's face in his final moments was a memory that was going to remain in my mind for a very long time. But then my gaze went down to his chest and the three bullet holes on it, which formed a ragged chevron-shaped wound whose bloodstained edges soaked a large part of his white shirt, and I remembered why I had been called down here in the first place. "Has someone tested him for GSR?" I asked, referring to gunshot residue, trace amounts of gunpowder which stuck on a person's clothes and even skin if a gun was fired in close proximity.

"Not yet, but if I had to guess, the coroner would probably find some," Kristofferson replied. "I've got three casings just a few paces away from him." He turned around and pointed his pen at the spot where the bullets casings had been found. "He was probably looking right at his killer as it happened."

"Caliber?"

".45 ACP, according to the CSI people," Okamoto replied. "Jeez, whoever did him in really wanted to make sure that he was gonna stay dead. I mean, three .45 rounds to the chest? If that didn't literally tear his heart apart, I don't know what will."

I nodded silently. Of course, it was all well and good coming up with theories based on the evidence, but right now we didn't have anything other than the fact that Jake Berenson's killer had used a very powerful round to do the deed. And I had to say that there was something peculiar about the way that the rounds had been grouped on his chest...

"Everybody, please stand back!" the officers guarding the police tape line said as a black Chevy Tahoe with blue and red lights in the grille and the front of the rearview mirrors turned into the road leading to the memorial. "Chief of Police coming through!"

"Oh, great," Kristofferson muttered. "Just what we needed right now. The brass breathing down our necks. This is gonna be good."

Rudolf "Rudy" Johnson, Chief of Police of the Los Angeles Police Department, stepped out of his Tahoe once it had made its way past the growing crowd gathering around the crime scene. He was a grizzled man who looked to be in his early sixties, a fact not helped by the bags around his eyes. He had this perpetually disdainful look upon him which had earned him a reputation for being a hard-hearted perfectionist who wanted every single police procedure in the entire department done by the book. And now he was here at the site of probably the biggest murder to happen in Los Angeles for decades.

Eli and I stood up and, along with Tommy, saluted the Chief as he approached us. "Gentlemen," the Chief said. "I trust that the investigation into the death of Mr. Berenson is happening according to procedure."

"We've barely even begun, sir," I replied for the three of us. "But rest assured that we are doing the best we can to make sure that justice will be served for this murder."

"You better damn well make sure that that happens, Doubleday," the Chief said softly. "I hope you realize the gravity of the situation that you, we are now in. This isn't a simple act of murder anymore, you three. This is an assassination. The evidence might not say that it is but the media damn sure will. We are talking about the leader of the goddamned Animorphs here. The saviors of mankind, vanquishers of the slugs. The people are gonna want answers, and they're gonna want the truth. I already promised the mayor that we were gonna get to the bottom of this, so you better make sure that I get to hold up my end of the deal. Understood?"

"Crystal clear, sir," I replied.

"Good. Now can someone please get the coroner here so that we can get this body moving and the circus out of here?" Chief Johnson asked, and Eli Kristofferson nodded and walked over to the waiting paramedics to give them the go-ahead to move Jake's body from the crime scene. At the same time, one of the Chief's assistants walked up to him and whispered, "The press wants a statement from you, sir. What shall I tell them?"

"Oh, I'll give them a statement all right," the Chief replied. "I'm gonna tell them that there will be a press conference at the HQ later this evening so I can tell them what they need to know." And then before leaving to meet with the press, the Chief turned to me and Tommy Okamoto and pointed a finger at us. "And I expect you two to get on with your jobs and get it over with."

"This is not gonna be easy for us, is it, Tommy?" I asked Okamoto once the Chief was out of earshot.

"No, Gav, it's not," he replied with a shake of the head.

Those turned out to be very prophetic words in the end, but in the days immediately after Jake Berenson's death, something would happen that would make the vast majority of us think that this case would be solved in a matter of days.


	2. The Evidence Available

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Locations, divisions, and procedures depicted here may not accurately reflect those used by the LAPD in real life. Viewer discretion is advised. However, I have not claimed to write realistic police fiction. As always though, do feel free to leave a review or a comment if you think this story is doing well or doing badly. It only takes a few minutes of your time and it allows me to know what you guys think about it. Thank you. - GR

As expected, the media circus around the death of Jake Berenson started as soon as Chief Johnson announced that he would be holding a press conference at the HQ where the media could bombard him and the poor press officers with questions about the murder. In fact, the case had been upgraded by the media from a murder to an assassination before night had even fallen. Of course, it didn't help that our dear mayor of the city made a televised speech right after the LAPD press conference promising that we will catch Jake's assassin as soon as possible. And we all know how the media laps up politicians' promises.

"Can you believe what this guy is saying?" Eli Kristofferson mumbled as we watched the mayor's speech that night. "Classic politico stuff. He goes and promises shit that he knows he can't do and puts everything on the shoulders of those who does know what to do so that when something wrong or big happens, he can put all the blame on us."

"Just relax, guy," I said as I sipped my coffee. "Don't think about him or anyone else too much."

"I mean, how is this guy the mayor of this city?" Eli continued. "Okay, sure, he was born here, but he grew up and was raised in Boston, for crying out loud! How can you like and vote for someone who is a fan of the Celtics, the Patriots, and the Red Sox? It's like he's the very antithesis of a citizen of LA! I just can't believe it."

"Hey, Eli, what about me?" Tom Okamoto called out. "I've been a fan of the 49ers my whole life and I've never heard you say shit about me."

"Well, that's the thing, Tommy. I didn't know you were a Niners fan, but now that I do, expect the worst from me."

"Oh, yeah? Bring it! Fuck the Raiders, and fuck the Raider Nation!"

I just shook my head and kept quiet as both Eli and Tom began roasting each other's favorite football teams. Now don't take this the wrong way, but football has never really been my sport of interest, if you know what I mean. I'm more of a basketball fan myself, although probably not as avid as others would say they are. Still, I can say that I follow the Lakers closely, as closely as my duties would allow me, and I do feel a certain sense of pride and joy at having lived through perhaps one of the greatest times to be a Lakers fan. Shaq and Kobe feud? What Shaq and Kobe feud? I don't know what you're talking about.

Eventually, our little shit-talking session came to an end when the telephone on my desk rang. "Doubleday," I said as I picked up.

"Detective, it's Officer Fernandez. The CCTV tapes from the memorial have just arrived. IT's going over them as we speak."

"Roger, thanks, Ferdie. We'll be down there in a moment." As I put the phone back on its cradle, Eli asked me, "What's up? What did Ferdie say?" I told them about the arrival of the CCTV tapes, something which both Eli and Tom received warmly.

"Thank God for that," Tommy muttered as we went down to the IT Division's office. "Finally got something to do while waiting for the results on the autopsy."

The Information Technology Division's office was located in the basement of the LAPD HQ, mostly because when it had been built, there was no such thing yet as the IT Division. In any case, the IT guys actually preferred being in the basement because it stays cool there even during the peak summer months, and because they say it's the perfect environment to store their machines, tapes, films, CDs and whatnot. When we three detectives arrived there, the IT guys were already poring over the footage from the CCTV cameras from the Yeerk War Memorial. Make that just a single camera because as it turns out, only the area immediately around the guard shack was monitored by the camera. The technology had grown by leaps and bounds, sure, but let's be honest, we're still quite a ways away from television-quality footage that shows like _CSI_ and _NCIS_ like to say we've got, at least when we're talking about cameras on the civilian market.

"We got anything yet on those tapes, guys?" Tommy Okamoto asked as we entered the IT office.

"Oh, come on, Tommy, that's a trick question and you know it," one of the IT guys said. "We've barely gone over these ourselves and you're already asking us to do the job the mayor gave you," he joked as he rewinded (rewound?) one particular segment of the tape that he was watching.

"I take it that that's Berenson we're seeing right now," I said, pointing at the blurry figure in the middle of the screen.

"The one and only," the IT guy nodded. "It lines up with the memorial guard's testimony. The guard said that Jake went to the memorial around 10:30, and the timestamp proves it."

"Yeah, and then he said that there was only one other person who came to the memorial after Jake and before he said he heard gunshots," I added. "Keep playing."

We stared at the screen for the next few minutes, watching for any signs of suspicious activity in and around the memorial guard post. At first, there was nothing at all that could be called that, with the only signs of movement on the footage being cars passing by on the road and the guard himself walking around his post, probably to stretch his legs a little bit. And then, around the 10:40 AM mark, I noticed a figure in a black hood and loose jeans enter the scene from the left. "There, right there," I said, pointing at the figure. "There he is. That has to be him." The IT guy continued playing the footage, this time at the normal framerate, and we all watched as the figure walked past the guard post. Unlike Jake, the figure didn't nod or wave at the guard or even acknowledge that he was there, and then just like that, he was out of the camera's field of view.

"You guys got any other angles of this guy?" Eli Kristofferson asked.

"Nope. This is the only camera in and around the area of the memorial, and traffic cameras hadn't yet been installed in this part of the city yet."

"Well, that's a shame," Eli said, shaking his head. "So all we know about this guy is that he wears a black hoodie and jeans. There are literally a million people in LA alone who fits that description. All right, roll the tape again. Maybe there's something that we're missing."

The IT guys played the tape on fast forward once again, and we kept our eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary that could have happened in between the arrival of the other person in the memorial to the moment that the guard reported gunshots. The tape went on for over an hour, but we were able to skim through it in a matter of minutes. And, as I had dreaded, there was nothing at all that happened in the intervening moments that would help us determine or even get a clue of what had happened. As the timestamp on the video struck 12:30, the guard poked his head out of his shack, most possibly due to the shots being fired, and then he rushed out of his shack in the direction of the memorial. A few minutes later he was back in his shack, radio to his lips, and minutes after that the first black-and-whites were rolling up to the scene.

"Well, that's all she wrote," the IT guy said as we came to the end of the recording. "Don't know what to say, guys. Just that it's a shame that Jake had to go the way he did. You know, I have him to thank for my sister being free of the slugs in her head. If it hadn't been for Jake and his Animorphs, I never would've known my sister was being held captive by those damned aliens inside her own head. Her own head! I just can't imagine the shit that she had gone through because of those damned worms."

"Well, we've all been there, Joaquin," Eli said, patting the other guy's shoulder.

"So," I said. "Thirty minutes in the icebox and all we've got to show for it is the clothes that the possible suspect was wearing. "I'm not going before either the Chief or the mayor with just that."

"Well, maybe we don't have to go to them with just that," Tommy Okamoto said. "Joaquin, both the suspect and the guard were on the film, right?" Joaquin nodded his head."Full body, yeah? And we know how high the guard at the memorial is, right?"

"Yeah, that's right," Eli replied. "I'd say about five-foot-nine, if we're being conservative."

"Okay. So is there a way to, I don't know, maybe compare the heights of the guard and the suspect?" Tommy asked.

"Shit, Tom, I think you're onto something here," Joaquin said, and he immediately slid his chair from one computer to another. "It's gonna take some time because there's a lot of variables to take into account here like the angle of the camera and the depth of field and the exact positioning and placement of both guys in the video, but it can be done."

"How long are we talking about here, Joaquin?" I asked.

"Um, two days, three tops," he replied. "And that's with the others like Reeves, Aguirre, and Colthurst helping me out. And since they are all now back at their homes tonight, I can't do anything else except prep the clips and stuff for tomorrow."

"Oh, not another one of your three-day guarantees, Joaquin," I joked. "Last time you said three days tops, it ended up taking you guys four days to give us what we wanted."

"Well, in our defense, Chandra wasn't expecting to get hit by the flu back then."

"All right, all right, we'll leave you to it, man," I said as me, Tommy, and Eli began walking out of the IT Division office.

"About time you three got out of my hair too!" Joaquin called out to us.

"Dude, you never had hair to begin with," Eli shot back, and as we climbed up the stairs we could hear Joaquin's laughing "Screw you!" echoing and following us.

"So, you guys wanna call it a night?" I asked as we got up to the ground floor.

"I called it a night thirty minutes ago already," Eli replied. "I mean, I'm already ready to leave. Turned off my lamp and my computer and all that. Good night, Gav, Tommy," he said as he tapped my back goodbye.

"I'm just gonna smoke a cig or two and then I'm also turning in for the night," Tommy added. He was most probably going to smoke cigarettes because he had been twirling his pen like mad for the last fifteen minutes, a sure sign that he was jonesing for a puff. "Catch you guys tomorrow," he said.

"Sure," I nodded. "I'm just gonna pick up some papers. You know, my night reading."

"Yeah, man, whatever. Good night, bro."

"Good night, man."

My mind was already preparing ahead for the next two days. As with the majority of murder cases, things don't fall into place for the investigators right on the get-go. Oftentimes we have to really sift through mountains upon mountains of evidence and data that may or may not actually be related to the case at hand. You could say that at this point my mind was already on autopilot as I began thinking ahead to the next few stages of this investigation. But as I woke up the next day and went right back to work, something was going to happen that was going to blow this case wide open. Or so we had all thought.


	3. The Confession

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A video confession making the rounds on the Internet appears to be the evidence needed to solve the case.

“Yo, Gav, have you seen this?” Elijah Kristofferson asked me as soon as I walked into the office the next day. He was sitting in front of his computer and chewing some gum.

“Look, man, I just clocked in right now, literally,” I replied as I took off my suit jacket and hung it on the back of my office chair. “I literally have no idea what you’re talking about. And unless it has something to do with the Berenson investigation then I don’t think I wanna see that or know about that.”

“It’s got everything to do with the Berenson case, man,” Eli said, rolling his own office chair towards my desk. “And I do mean everything. I think it’s the break that we need to solve this case once and for all.”

“And how in the world did you come across that information?” I asked disbelievingly. Not that I had doubts about Eli’s investigative abilities; in fact, he had proven quite a good detective in a great many number of cases. I just really did not believe that we could have come across evidence about the killer and their motivations this quickly and this early into the investigation.

“Email, would you believe it?” Eli replied. “It actually came to me by way of some chain mail spam. In fact, I was actually about to delete it from in inbox, and then my stupid mouse decided to click on the link in the spam instead of the delete button, and it led me to this website full of videos, man. Some place called YouTube or something like it, I think. Anyway, the link in the email led me to this video where this guy straight up confesses to killing Berenson. Come on, Gav, just take a look at it.”

“All right, man,” I muttered even though I have to admit that I was still in a bit of a shock about it. Someone posted a video confessing to the murder of Jake Berenson? Did this person seek attention? Truth be told, people have actually killed, or tried to kill people, just so they could see their name on the papers. Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin, John Hinckley Jr., comes to mind. He wanted to assassinate Reagan so that he could become a celebrity (or whatever his twisted version of it was) to attract the attention of Jodie Foster. Not really sure if the same could be said of this person whom Eli claims to have confessed to Jake Berenson’s murder, but then again, some people will stop at nothing just to get famous. This is Hollywood after all; the home of celebrity.

“I’m telling you, man, this thing is really making waves, and I do mean making waves,” Eli said as he went back to his desk and I rolled my own chair beside him. “The first time I saw this video, I saw that it had been seen at least ten thousand times as well. Now, look at this. More than a hundred thousand views! Actually, make that almost two hundred thousand views because I think this guy just clocked past 150,000. Anyway, Gav, just watch it and see for yourself, and then tell me that this isn’t it.” Eli then put the video up on fullscreen, and then he hit play.

The first thing that appeared on the screen was a man who appeared to be in his late thirties or early forties. He was standing, or sitting, in front of a green, olive, or khaki wall. An incandescent lamp behind the camera was shining at him, the shadows accenting the lines on his forehead and the bags underneath his eyes. He was staring at something to this right (my left) behind the camera, and then he suddenly turned his gaze right at the camera. Then, without introduction or a preamble, he said, “Hello, world. My name is John Harvey Chapman Jr. And I killed Jake Berenson.”

My eyebrows went up, and Eli would tell me later on that they almost melded with my hairline on that day. “Well, he certainly got to his point, I’ll tell you that much,” I told Eli. And then I shut up as I watched the rest of the video.

“I don’t see why I have to explain myself, to tell people why I did what I did,” John Harvey Chapman Jr. said. “But if you must know, Jake Berenson deserved to die. Many, many people died because of him. And I’m not talking about just the seventeen thousand Yeerks in the Pool ship that he vented into space, but they are among those that have died by his hand. No, I am talking about the human lives lost because of Jake Berenson’s actions. The soldiers and morphers who died assaulting the Pool ship as a distraction for his own attack. The infested humans who were killed by the Vissers because of the Animorphs’ attacks. Heck, he even ordered the death of his own brother. Jake Berenson should have been sentenced to death at The Hague alongside the Yeerk Esplin, but he wasn’t. So I have decided to take matters into my own hands. If you are watching this, then this means that I have succeeded. The world is now less one mass murderer. All I have done is kill one person. The person I killed has killed lots of people himself, and more others have been killed on his orders.”

And just like that, the video was over. “That’s it? That’s all of it?” I asked Eli.

“Yup,” Eli nodded. “Short and sweet, am I right?”

“Well, he didn’t waste a lot of time faffing about, that’s for sure,” I muttered.

“Tell me about it,” Eli said. “This thing has practically exploded the Internet. It’s spreading all over the place, like a virus. Everyone’s talking about it. Just it and nothing else. I wouldn’t be surprised if the news starts picking up on it sooner or later because it’s basically a video of someone confessing to killing the savior of mankind. God, what a mess,” he muttered, shaking his head.

“I hear you, man, I hear you,” I said. “Now the question is, is this actionable? Can we do anything about this? I mean, I know that this is enough to get an arrest warrant on this Chapman guy, but what else do we know about him? His address, his status, his Social Security number?”

“Not sure about the address, you know, but I’m sure that we don’t really need to know his Social Security number,” Eli replied. “I feel like that’s for the FBI or the CIA. I don’t know. But I’ve already got people working on finding Chapman, and I’ve also got the IT guys working their magic on the video. You know, tracking the source, finding where it was made, that kind of stuff.”

“Yeah, I never really understood how they do that,” I shook my head. “Just like you said, for me it’s magic what they do. Maybe that’s why I’m out on the street with you and Tommy instead of down at the basement with the computers and stuff.”

“Wassup, bitches?” Tommy Okamoto said as he swept into the office in his beige trench coat. “What’s happening?”

“Right on time, Tommy,” I called out to him. “We were just talking about you. Something’s just come up on the Berenson case. Eli, wanna show him the video?”

“Yep. Over here, Tommy,” Eli said, waving Okamoto over to his desk to watch the video while I returned to mine. I already knew that sooner or later, we were going to get the call to bring in Mr. John Harvey Chapman Jr. for questioning; it was just going to be a matter of when it was going to happen. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. But it was definitely going to happen. So I might as well get a little housekeeping done on my desk before I was called away to perform my duties.

The call came in at around five in the afternoon. I don’t know how or why it happened so quickly. Maybe the other detectives found Chapman’s address so soon after Eli put them on the case and the warrant was also processed quickly. Or maybe the PD wanted to move this quickly because of the victim in the case and the manner in which he was killed. There are always reasons why the bureaucracy suddenly speeds up from its usual snail’s pace. But the outcome was the same: the warrant for John Harvey Chapman Jr. had been issued, and it was now our duty to see that it was served.

In any case, usually the warrant would be served to the suspect by one detective (sometimes two) supported by at least a pair of uniformed officers. Usually, that was more than enough to convince the suspect that any sort of resistance was futile (to overuse an old sci-fi quote) and surrender meekly to the authorities. But today was different. Not only were three detectives assigned to deliver Chapman his warrant (me, Eli, and Tommy, in case you were wondering) but our backup also consisted of over a dozen SWAT officers and at least twice that many police officers. We all knew what was going on: the PD wanted to show the people of Los Angeles and the United States that we were doing everything in our power to bring the killer of the leader of the Animorphs to justice.

According to the information that we had been given, John Harvey Chapman was currently in a motel over in South Central. A part of me wondered why our perps almost always had to be found inside seedy motels in the shadier parts of town, but the rational part of me told that other part that this all made sense. These guys were hiding from the law, and these lower-end motels usually accepted cash from their customers without questions, so of course they were going to hide out here. Except they never learned from the fact that a lot of their fellow suspects and criminals have also been caught hiding out in the very same motels that they were using.

Chapman’s room was on the second floor of the motel. It was one of those motels where all the doors were facing the parking lot, which meant that despite our orders to run silent (no sirens, no horns, as little noise as possible) we all knew that our suspect surely must have seen us approaching. We went up the stairs to the second floor in single file with me at the head, followed by a couple of SWAT officers, and Eli and Tommy bringing up the rear. We flattened ourselves against the wall as we got closer to the room, and then I stopped just before I crossed the door to Chapman’s room. I waited for a few seconds as I caught my breath, and then I banged my fist on the door. “John Harvey Chapman, this is the LAPD!” I called out. “Open the door!”

But there was no response from inside. I waited another few seconds to give him a chance to respond, and then I knocked on the door once again. “John Harvey Chapman, LAPD! Open the door or we will come in by force!” I shouted. But still the room remained silent. I turned back to the SWAT guys and gestured with my head at them and the door. The team leader nodded and he and two other SWAT guys moved past me and towards the wall on the other side of the door. The leader counted down from three with his fingers, and then one of the other SWATs behind him stepped up to the door and kicked his right foot at the door near the knob. The wood splintered but held. The SWAT man kicked once again, and this time the door swung open. The SWAT who had kicked open the door brought his weapon up to his shoulder and went inside, followed by his teammates. I went inside behind the third SWAT man, but I had not yet even put two feet inside the room before the SWAT called out, “Clear!”

The room was small, even by no-star motel hell standards. It was basically a bedroom with an attached kitchen and bathroom, both just barely big enough to be worthy of the names. Empty boxes of takeout food were strewn all over the place, and scattered newspapers practically covered the floor. And the suspect himself was lying flat on his stomach on the bed, snoring and sleeping without a care in the world. I thought I could even see the drool dripping out of his mouth and onto the pillow. I wouldn’t say that I had a weak stomach but I have to say that I was grossed out by the sight before my eyes at that moment. At least he was wearing clothes, even if it was just a wifebeater and boxer shorts. I’ve seen my fair share of naked and half-naked perps trying to run away from the law. Some stick in my mind more than others. And that was perhaps not the best choice of words.

I shook my head and cleared my throat. “Mr. Chapman,” I called out. “Mr. Chapman!” I waited until the man had opened his eyes, and when they did, they immediately went wide in both surprise and recognition. “I’m Detective Doubleday of the LAPD, and you are under arrest for the murder of Jake Berenson. Now take your hands out from under your pillow and place them above your head.”

Slowly, Chapman did as I had told him, taking his hands out from under the pillow and raising them over his head. Not that he had any other choice in the matter. Well, he didn’t have another choice that would have resulted in him keeping his life. He had two MP5s and a shotgun pointed at him, and I also had my service Glock in my hand. Not pointed at anybody or anywhere but ready to be used at a moment’s notice. But on this day I didn’t have to use my gun, and instead it was my handcuffs which went to work as I secured Chapman and brought him out of the motel. It looked to the world as if the murder of Jake Berenson was finally solved. But, as we were to find out later, it was just only the beginning of the whole investigation.

**Author's Note:**

> So I finally did it. I finally wrote a sequel to _Valentine's Day_. It got really dark, I'll tell you that much. Especially with the fact that I just killed off Jake! But as I have it in my mind right now, it's going to be more than about just the matter of Jake being killed. And that's all that I'm going to say before I spoil too much of my own work. Oh, and if you've managed to read all the way down to here, I would like to say that I would really appreciate it if you could drop a review or a comment for this story. As always, I say that I really want to know what you guys really think about my works, and it only takes up a few minutes of your time. And as always, thanks for the support and feedback. It really means everything to me. - GR


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